Whack-a-Mole

Nice healz! My first healer kudos. Just like that I want to jump right back on the Dungeon Finder and find another group of walking wounded with which to practice my craft. Last night I finally felt some healing pressure, just the merest glimpse of some actual trauma. Level 19, peoples. This is serious business now.

Actually some of the heat was probably unnecessary. I randomly drew Deadmines from the Dungeon Finder (which, can I just say, is still one my favorite instances in the whole game?), and ended up with a druid, a warrior, a paladin, and a rogue. Once again, three people that wanted to tank, and did. This can get tricky for a healer, and I found myself oom in short order. This is the very essence of Whack-a-mole, which is of course, the real priest mini-game.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, as Salvatore posted earlier this week in his comments on this blog. In these low-level instances, you end up with people that just don’t understand the fundamentals of the game. Anyone who has been lurking around Azeroth for the half decade that the game has been around can’t help but be mystified by this. After all, aggro management is 1st term Freshman stuff, right? MMORPG fundamentals 101 with professor Kaplan. How could anyone have missed that class!? You forget that among the 12 million person student body, there are real Freshman running around (probably drunk, with hormones ablaze) that don’t know a dot from a pot and haven’t even started looking for Mankrick’s Wife.

So like Rodney Dangerfield, I’m going Back to School. I’m majoring in Whack-a-mole, which isn’t so bad really. It is, after all, a classic. At this early stage of my career, my heals and the associated health pools are so small, and the tanking is so disorganized, that we may actually be talking about more net whacking than in endgame. Of this, I cannot be certain. Perhaps the elder priests among us can speak to the veracity of this assertion.

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From The Grave

1 comment

Yeah, IMO? Right now you have the fewest tools and smallest health bars to keep afloat. It’s like you’ve been given one, tiny hammer and every nail you’re trying to hit has a tiny head and is already kinda bent… good luck driving that thing in straight and clean.

Loading up on Improved Renew from the Holy tree can help a *ton* at this level, because with that extra boost, your renew ticks can pretty much keep up with a lot of incoming tank damage — or at least buying your nice, slow Heal spell tons of time to wind up before landing. Naturally, you need to hold off before dropping that thing on your target. Even Renew ticks are enough to pull aggro if your newbie, undergeared tank can’t snag aggro quickly. And chances are, they can’t. Or don’t know how. Or are specced Ret…